A senior police officer has broken ranks to describe how he and others were "appalled" at the behaviour of colleagues during the miners' strike as calls mount for a fresh inquiry into the policing of the dispute.

The former Cleveland Constabulary officer said he was so disillusioned with the behaviour of a number of police towards striking miners that he asked to be excused from attending picket lines during the 1984/85 dispute.

"I was appalled at the conduct of a number of officers, generally members of the Metropolitan police who we described as the Banana Squad – all bent and yellow," said the officer in a letter to Labour MP Ian Lavery.

The author, who did not want to be named, said he had been moved to speak out by the Observer's coverage of police tactics during the strike. He said he witnessed "verbal abuse by officers in police vehicles taunting pickets", and that despite making a series of complaints to senior command, not a single internal investigation was launched.

His comments follow growing pressure for the criminal records of thousands of miners convicted during the dispute to be quashed. Last week calls for the issue to be re-examined surfaced in Wales and Scotland, where justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was asked to review each of the convictions made during the dispute. Lawyers and campaigners claim convictions may be "unsafe" and politically motivated, particularly for picket line offences where miners were threatened with prison sentences but offered less severe punishments if they accepted bail conditions that prohibited them from picketing.

Mick Antoniw, Assembly Member for Pontypridd, is also pushing for an inquiry, noting that in relation to Orgreave: "No action was taken against the police in respect of fabrication of evidence or the attempt to pervert the course of justice."

Lavery, a former president of the National Union of Mineworkers and MP for Wansbeck in Northumberland, said: "Ordinary hard-working people were charged with crimes they didn't commit. Somebody needs to be accountable."

Campaigners want the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate police tactics during the entire strike and are urging the director of public prosecutions to examine evidence of misconduct. The IPCC is already investigating allegations of assault, perjury and misconduct in a public office in relation to the "Battle of Orgreave", the pivotal 1984 clash between police and pickets at the British Steel coking plant in south Yorkshire.

Vera Baird, police and crime commissioner for the Northumbria area, said her experience as a barrister during the strike suggested that potentially there were hundreds of cases where police might have perverted the course of justice. She herself dealt with two or three cases a week during the strike, many involving "invented allegations, copied notebooks and allegations from officers that weren't even at the scene".

Baird, solicitor-general during the last Labour government, who represented a number of miners at Orgreave who were acquitted after police tampered with evidence, said: "It was scandalous. There were an awful lot of cases." She said that a consistent problem was the deployment of officers from different forces in mining regions.

Meanwhile, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, has been offered the full support of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, with both intent on getting justice over the role of South Yorkshire police in the manipulation of evidence and "fitting up" innocent people.

Hillsborough campaign organiser Sheila Coleman said that any examination of the policing during the stadium disaster in 1989 would need to include policing tactics and attitude displayed during the miners' strike.

Coleman said that officers consistently referred to the strike during the inquests into the deaths of 96 football supporters. She said: "Their experience of the miners' strike was used as a positive indicator of their ability to police large crowds."An early day motion asking for the director of public prosecutions to deliver a full comprehensive inquiry into the policing of the miners' strike has so far attracted the support of 39 MPs.